Beyond Anthropic Selection: The Ortropic Principle and Generative Cosmology

Observer selection constrains what can be observed without exhausting the question of how organized capacities arise. This paper develops an Ortropic Principle for generative cosmology: explanations of organized existence should preserve the dependencies through which realized forms establish, sustain, and transform the conditions of further forms. Three comparison worlds distinguish developmental provenance, current capacity, and observer presence. A target-relative preservation test identifies when a coarse description loses information needed for a specified explanation. Published weakless-universe models supply a physical application: nuclear permissibility, fuel production, stellar persistence, and subsequent use require different comparisons. The argument draws on the effective observation principle, counterfactual explanation, organizational closure, and assembly theory. Its contribution is a cosmological synthesis that makes changes of explanatory target and scope explicit, not a replacement probability rule or a new physical computation. Generative dependence has independent explanatory standing in observerless and finite histories as well as in histories that produce knowledge. The manuscript and accompanying documentation are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Correspondence: [email protected].